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Tuesday, September 30, 2008

In these troubled times the last thing we need is an Obama presidency, so every tuesday until the election I will be participating in these blogbursts.

Blog Burst: Nobama08

An informed voter is not only a wise voter, he or she is probably also a good American. In this regard, the press has always been the cornerstone in the foundation of American democracy … that is, until the press became such an advocate of socialism and liberal politics that it can no longer be relied upon to convey “fair and balanced” information.

For this reason, Confessions of A Closet Republican joins with several others in a Noobama08 blog burst each Tuesday of the week until Election Day. If we cannot obtain the truth about our politicians from an unencumbered press, then we’ll form a cooperative to distribute information independently.

Stanley Kurtz is a journalist and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Kurtz’ article in the Wall Street Journal explains why Barack Obama is untrustworthy for the office of the President of the United States . He lacks integrity … and if it is one thing we do not need in the White House, it is yet another dishonest politician.

Mr. Kurtz writes:

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. LastApril, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in myneighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago 's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued astatement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland 's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead, CAC disbursedmoney through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity, and bilingualism thantraditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America 's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

To say Mr. Obama is not ready for the presidency is a gross understatement. It is not simply that he lacks experience … it is also that he repudiates traditional American values and culture by embracing Marxist ideology, has been an acolyte of black racist theology, cuddled up with the anarchist activism of Saul Alinski, and even worse … the man is simply and irrevocably dishonest. There is nothing about Barack Obama that may cause us to think he honors American tradition, or shares with us our time-honored values. Significantly, a man who works to undermine our education system through socialist engineering is a man who seeks to destroy America .

If the American people elect this man to the presidency, he will certainly destroy the cultural and political fabric of the United States , and when he has finished his work, none of us will recognize what he has left behind: The People’s Socialist Republic of the United States.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

When Obama described small-town, working class Americans as "bitter" with "antipathy to people who aren't like them" (obviously referring to the "gun toting, clinging to their religion", conservative Republicans), he could just as well have been talking about liberal democrats. Antipathy to people who aren't like them? You bet. If you aren't an Obamaniac or tow the Democratic Party line, you will feel their wrath. Oftentimes, they look upon you as something to be pitied or abhorred, it depends on whether they happen to be friend or foe. I had dinner with an old colleague I hadn't seen in over 15 years, while on the west coast, recently. He's in the entertainment industry, and after a nice chat the conversation turned to politics. I had every intention of keeping my mouth shut, but when he started talking about how he feared this country would slip further into misery and hell (my words) if we were to have another 4 years with Republicans at the helm, I was unable to hold my tongue. We had a polite and civil discussion, but the fact that he felt the need to mention, at one point, he didn't choose his friends based on politics, was very telling. Point being, most liberal democrats do choose their friends based on politics, and if they do associate with non-liberals, they will inevitably find ways of belittling and making fun of these poor, ignorant creatures.

And bitter? Heck yes. Liberals are as bitter as they come, about everything, especially their country and particularly Republicans. We're already witnessing that bitterness and resentment, after a blow-them-out-of-the-water speech by Palin at the RNC. That rancor has taken aim at Sarah Palin, the breath of fresh air that is our Vice Presidential nominee, like a carrion its prey. Barack Obama, and the liberals of this country (including the mainstream media) are running scared, so they are doing everything in their power to bring the McCain/Palin ticket down, and it's started with the smears; lies and innuendos, many of which no-one bothers to verify. In Palm Beach County, Florida, a County School District library manager forwarded school librarians a list of books Palin allegedly tried to have banned (whilst mayor of Wasilla). As we all know, that was a hoax. Then we have the rumors that her baby Trig was actually her daughter Bristol's; there's the gun-toting picture of Palin in a bikini, which turned out to be photoshopped. We have troopergate, though getting a psycho cop who tasered his own stepson, among other things, out of uniform and off the streets should be commended, not censured. Then we have the rumor that Track Palin joined the military as a plea bargain to avoid jail for having vandalized some school buses. Not so, according to some pals who did.

Ronald Kessler of Newsmax debunks some of the Palin myths:

Myth: As governor of Alaska, Palin put the governor’s plane up for sale on eBay but did not really sell it.Fact: After she did not find a buyer on eBay, she sold the plane eight months later through a broker for $2.2 million.

Myth: Palin did not really stop the “Bridge to Nowhere.”Fact: During her gubernatorial race in 2006, she endorsed the bridge but as governor rejected it, allocating the federal earmark money elsewhere. Meanwhile, in 2005, Barack Obama voted against a Senate amendment to stop funding for the project.

Myth: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin banned nearly 100 books, including “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and “Death of a Salesman.”Fact: Palin never banned any books. An emailed list of books she supposedly banned included Harry Potter books that had not yet been published when she was in office.

Myth: Palin fired her public safety commissioner because he would not terminate a trooper who was her former brother-in-law after he had been suspended for five days for misconduct.Fact: Palin did want Walt Monegan to fire her former brother-in-law. But extensive emails from Palin and her aides show she was upset with him because he repeatedly defied her instructions on a string of budget requests. He was offered another job but declined to take it.

Myth: Palin cut funding for special needs education by 62 percent.Fact: Funding for the program in question was actually tripled thanks to legislation signed by Palin.

Myth: Palin wanted Alaska to secede from the U.S.Fact: A member of the Alaskan Independence Party incorrectly told the New York Times that Palin at one time had been a member. She later recanted this claim and issued a public apology to the governor.

Myth: Palin left Wasilla residents disenchanted with her.Fact: In subsequent elections, Wasilla residents voted for Palin by 70 percent or more.Myth: Palin has no experience.Fact: As noted in the Newsmax article, “McCain Shows He Is the Genuine Article,” Palin has a string of accomplishments to show for her herself. As mayor, she cut property taxes by 75 percent and reduced her own salary by 10 percent. After joining the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in 2003, she led an ethics probe of the commission's chairman, Randy Ruedrich, who also was the state GOP chairman. Facing conflict-of-interest-allegations, Ruedrich admitted ethics violations and resigned. Besides opposing the $400 million “Bridge to Nowhere,” Palin as governor used her veto power to cut nearly $2 billion from the state budget. She was successful in enacting ethics reform legislation. While pushing to develop more energy resources, she reformed the system for paying Alaskans royalties from oil production. That will enable her to deliver a rebate of $1,200 — in addition to $2,069 in dividends — to each resident of the state.

Now people (including some on the right) are criticizing Palin's interview skills. So, Palin doesn't interview well, neither do I. Does that make me any less equipped to get on stage? No, it does not. I'm also better at getting my thoughts on paper than discussing them, that doesn't mean I lack intelligence. Neither McCain nor Palin are great speakers, but we're not casting celebrities, or stars for the next Hollywood blockbuster movie, called "The Next 4 Years In The White House", we're electing the next President and Vice-President. And with the congress and senate as crippled and corrupt as it is, I think it's great we're getting 2 'mavericks' of sorts. McCain who is willing to put "country first", and Palin, a Washington outsider, which we desperately need.

But, you can count on the Democratic Party, and Obama-lovers nationwide, to ratchet up the attacks as election day nears, on both Palin and McCain. Obama doesn't have anywhere near the lead he wants or expected, so watch out.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

For those of us in the entertainment industry, a teleprompter is a godsend, at least for certain projects. It means we don't have to sit for days memorizing scads of technical information for an industrial film about some science and technology product. I have filmed many, and I can tell you it takes a huge pressure off knowing that the dialogue will be available to you, and that you don't have to rely on your feeble memory to come up with technological terms you've never heard of. But, there is definitely a skill to reading a teleprompter well; they aren't that simple to use, and it takes practice to make it look natural. Obama has it down to an art. McCain doesn't.

Let's face it, Obama is a magnificent orator, as long as he is on teleprompter, but the following short video shows what happens when he loses track. It just demonstrates his flair for speechifying is only as good as his speechwriter, his teleprompter, and whoever happens to be running it.

I was standing next to you when you heard the terrible news. Did you sense Me?

I want you to know that I saw every face. I knew

every name - though not all know Me. Some met Me

for the first time on the 86th floor.

Some sought Me with their last breath.

Some couldn't hear Me calling to them through the

smoke and flames; 'Come to Me... this way... take

My hand.' Some chose, for the final time, to ignore Me.

But, I was there.

I did not place you in the Tower that day. You

may not know why, but I do. However, if you were

there in that explosive moment in time, would you have

reached for Me?

Sept. 11, 2001 was not the end of the journey

for you. But someday your journey will end. And I

will be there for you as well. Seek Me now while I may

be found. Then, at any moment, you know you are

'ready to go.'

I will be in the stairwell of your final moments.

GOD

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Monday, September 01, 2008

I knew nothing about Sarah Palin, other than the fact she's the Governor of Alaska, considered hot, and that many anti-McCain Republicans claimed they would be more likely to vote for him if he chose her as Vice President. And they are.

I was ambivalent, knowing so little about her, until McCain picked her as Veep and I started my research. And what I see, so far, I like.

The major criticism about Palin, including from fellow conservatives, is that she's as inexperienced as Obama, which isn't quite true if you check out a great side-by-side comparison of Obama and Palin on Redstate.com.

Palin's executive experience: 2 years as Governor and 10 years as a Mayor.Obama's: zippo

They also seem to forget that she isn't running for President, and McCain isn't dead. Many, like Dick Morris, think it's a brilliant choice. I think the liberals do, as well, considering the dreck they are trying to dredge up. Sour grapes that after the Palin announcement McCain got more bounce and press than Obama did after the Clinton Convention.

I highly recommend checking out the redstate.com link above, if you already haven't.

The fact that Alaskans are pissing and moaning about the fact she will no longer be Governor, is also a testament to her character, abilities and governing style.

GOPUSA says this about her:

Governor Palin is a tough executive who has demonstrated during hertime in office that she is ready to be president. She has brought Republicans and Democrats together within her Administration and has a record of delivering on the change and reform that we need in Washington.Governor Palin has challenged the influence of the big oil companies while fighting for the development of new energy resources. She leadsa state that matters to every one of us -- Alaska has significant energyresources and she has been a leader in the fight to make America energy independent.In Alaska, Governor Palin challenged a corrupt system and passed a landmark ethics reform bill. She has actually used her veto and cutbudgetary spending. She put a stop to the "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost taxpayers $400 million dollars.As the head of Alaska's National Guard and as the mother of a soldier herself, Governor Palin understands what it takes to lead our nationand she understands the importance of supporting our troops. Governor Palin has the record of reform and bipartisanship that others can only speak of. Her experience in shaking up the status quo is exactly what is needed in Washington today.